Animal Learning and Behavior Lab
Valeria González
Email:val.gonzalezd@gmail.com |
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Academic Trajectory |
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My interest in research started during my second year as an undergraduate in Psychology, when I joined the Laboratory of Experimental Psychology in the University of Chile with Doctors Mario Laborda and Gonzalo Miguez. I collaborated in experiments about fear conditioning, evaluative conditioning and associative tolerance. This last topic, that especially called my attention, was the one I chose to develop my thesis about behavioral techniques to prevent recovery of the associative tolerance of alcohol in rats. After obtaining my Bachelor degree in 2014, I continued my collaboration with the lab. I also joined the chronobiology and neuromodulation labs in the School of Medicine as a research assistant, where I collaborated developing an animal model of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). My objective was to learn more techniques to study and understand animal behavior. In 2016 I came to Portugal to start my PhD under the supervision of Doctors Armando Machado and Marco Vasconcelos. I am supported by a grant from the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT). |
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Research interests |
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My research interests are in the area of animal behavior, learning and comparative psychology. More specifically, I am interested in how humans and non-humans choose and make decisions. I am trying to understand the mechanisms behind suboptimal behavior, using a task in which animals tend to prefer the option that leads to less food overall. My PhD experiments explore the variables that seem responsible for this preference, and try to understand the role that each element of the task plays in animals’ final decision. |
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Publications |
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González, V.V., Navarro, V., Miguez, G., Betancourt, R., & Laborda, M.A. (2016). Preventing the recovery of extinguished ethanol tolerance. Behavioural Processes, 124, 141-148. Doi: 10.1016/j.beproc.2016.01.004 |
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